AddOn Studio 2010 for World of Warcraft
This is a continuation of the original AddOn Studio line of AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft brought back to life using Visual Studio 2010, while the authors and their off-shore development teams are busy making other Microsoft things. I believe the original concept has promise and a lot of potential, and possibly not only just for WoW. The bulk of official releases have been nearly zero over the last few years, and again I think this tool deserves another chance. AddOn Studio 2010 What you need: *Free Visual Studio Shell: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Isolated) Redistributable Package *AddOn Studio 2010: ASWoW 3.0.20110310 Optional: *Blizzard Interface ToolKit: World of Warcraft Interface AddOn Kit *VS SP1 Update: Visual Studio SP 1 Gettign Started Installation: *Download and install the Visual Studio Shell *Download AddOn Studio *Copy the AddOn Studio folder in the zip file to any location you like, such as c:\Program Files or d:\apps *Run the WowAddonStudio.exe, or create a short cut and run that. Basic usage: *Create a new Project *Add existing files or create new ones *Deploy to WoW by clicking build *Run WoW to use your Addon... Original Microsoft Introduction 2006? (mostly verbatim) For a big chunk of the gaming population, addons are mysterious things you download and hope will run. But for many talented people, they're an opportunity to help the community and make things easier for the rest of us. So what does this mean exactly? The project team has converted the addon writing process from text and code to drag and drop. You get the look and feel of common programs like Visual Basic but with the command structure of WoW. By having the process be graphic, you just pick and choose what you want from the list. Specifically, Addon Studio will provide an interface that allows addon creators to build in familiar surroundings. You'll also have the ability to auto-generate items like the table of contents or lua events. Error checking for FrameXML and Lua parsing also helps to speed the addon process up. Likewise, they have included Ace2 templates so you can still tap into one of the most commonly used addon libraries and updater systems. Long-term, this should open up addon creation to those that enjoy dabbling with programing, but don't have the time or skill to build them without a bit more structure. And that can only be a good thing. Today's Reality Concepts of game and addon development, especially for WoW, are far more understood by a much larger audience now, and the original promotional ideas for this tool no longer hold. Some concepts like pure drag-and-drop development for the masses historically have never really useful in practice. At the heart of it development requires special knowledge that almost always pushes one outside that realm. What this product really was, and is, is a general IDE for WoW addon development using a free Visual Studio back-end (much like the free Express versions of Visual Studio C# and Web), with additional support for graphical frame development via a fairly extensive set of modules in the IDE. There are quite a few bells and whistles too, all of which together threatened to make WoW Add-On development tools a real first class citizen, but there were always too many almost finished features, and too many critical bugs making the original product almost unusable. I would like to thank those involved in creating and releasing earlier renditions of this tool (the original Microsoft sponsored 1.0 and 2.0) for the effort, which was an enormous amount of work and time spent, and to Microsoft for supporting extensibility in their products and for supporting free software as much as they have in their own way. Whats Changed Most of the original features are still intact, and most are in much better shape than they were. Some things are different and hopefully these changes overall are for the better. - Support for the installer was dropped. This was one of the biggest headaches they faced and was a huge time sink and left nearly every first time user stranded at some point. Installers, especially for a VS shell product are non-trivial and in this case probably required more traditional packaging and release QA than they had purview for. Instead a great deal of work was put into making this a portable install style product, where you just drop the files and run it. For anyone who knows about products involving COM and Windows applications, this is non-trivial as well, but is done at start up time with more intimate knowledge of whats actually missing, and because this is based on the ISO shell there's far less to do and a much greater chance for a successful experience. Contact celess22@gmail.com Category:Development Help AddOns